


Kara's Dreams

by jollywriter



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-19
Updated: 2017-05-19
Packaged: 2018-11-02 15:48:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10947696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jollywriter/pseuds/jollywriter
Summary: Kara Danvers was submerged into a medically induced coma to save her life after she was wounded. To the outside world, she is unconscious. But she's fully able to think. She's just paralyzed.And while she thinks, she struggles with everything that's happened, the weight of her world, and her responsibility as Atlas, to Earth.





	Kara's Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> While this is it's own thing, it also fits with what's happening in my other story: Lena's Insurrection. 
> 
> I apologize for the perspective. This woke me out of a dead sleep and I wrote it down as it occurred to me. 
> 
> Follow me on Tumblr @thejollywriter for updates and memes and Supercorp spam.

My name is Kara Zor-El.   
And I hurt.   
Three days ago I was short in the chest with bullets. Not a big deal, normally. I feel the impact, but it doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t cut my uniform, doesn’t break skin, doesn’t even bruise.   
Three days ago, I learned that my enemies made kryptonite bullets. Fun fact: they’re effective.  
I’d seen gunshot wounds. I’d tried to save people from catching more of them.   
It never seems to work.   
I’m never fast enough. Bullets only move at 2,000 odd feet per second. I can move fast enough that time becomes. . . .   
Odd.   
Bullets slow to inches per second, easily.   
And I still can’t catch them all.   
I watched these bullets fly into me. I saw the flash, I saw the particles of gunpowder, I waited for them to crumple and fall away like the others always did.   
But it didn’t happen.   
The rounds dug into my chest. Punched through the family crest of my blue uniform, tear a hole into me. The second shot came faster—  
Was it faster or was my perception speeded up?  
I couldn’t slow things down. I couldn’t stop the bullets.   
The second round cut into me. Drilled, easily. Pain I didn’t know I could feel blossomed in places in me that I didn’t know existed, and I fell.   
There was no third shot.   
And the shooter vanished. I couldn’t even hold onto their leg.   
I’ve lifted condensed stars. A million ton space-craft, and I only got vaguely close to my limits.   
It was a strain but I knew I could pick more if I had to.   
All that power. And it vanished, with two shots.   
Kryptonite bullets.   
That reminds me.   
When I came to earth, I arrived in a meteor shower. There were a variety of other rocks in the shower, space has a way of collecting things into a condensed and miss-mashed pile of stray objects. But part of the meteors that fell to earth the night I fell were pieces of my planet.   
My home.   
A shadow that hangs over me that I can’t be rid of because I can’t go back. No one can, it doesn’t exist, it’s an accretion disk in the solar system around Rao.   
I hurt.   
I fell to earth surrounded by the debris of my own home, and when my cousin opened my pod, I realized the one task I had to fulfill was already failed.   
When my parents put me in the pod, they told me to look after my cousin.   
Interstellar travel is difficult and things go wrong. One such thing: my cousin got here first because my pod went off-course.   
He was grown, and already inherited the label of Superman. He was Clark Kent, and Kal-El.   
I’m just Kara Zor-El.   
My name modified, a little, by the family that found me.   
Meteor showers are fun to watch. So Jerimiah and Eliza thought it’d be fun to bring Alex out to take a look. They had a telescope and everything.   
Sheer dumb luck, parabolic trajectories, and time, and I landed half a mile from where they watched.   
It was farm land; corn grew in those fields, and they rushed to put the fire out, and instead of smoldering rock from another world, they found me. A person, encased in a busted piece of Krytponian engineering.   
I hurt.   
My world is dead, human doctors who are trying to extract the bullets think they’ve medically slipped me into a coma because the kryptonite is doing so many heinous things to my blood and my body that I cannot be still.   
They think I can’t feel the knives they’ve dug into my flesh, as they try and extract the bullets.   
They think I can’t hear them, struggle with a balance; they have to get the poison out. But the skin is still too hard to cut through. And the only way to get the bullets out is to wait until I’m weakened enough for their scalpels to work.   
They think this is a kindness, keeping me submerged.   
No kindness at all. I cannot scream, I cannot lend voice to the pain in my body or the fear in my heart and I heard Lena stand on the other side of that glass and walk away and—  
I hurt.   
I hear everything. They think I don’t, it’s a lie we tell each other. I ignore so much, until I can’t ignore something.   
I heard my sister stand there for time I couldn’t count.   
Every night, after I landed, when the world was too loud, I tried to tune everything out. The people who adopted me (it took so long for me to call them my parents) bought me ear muffs. To deaden the sound. It helped. Some.   
Despite that, I could always hear Alex’s heartbeat. My sister. That came faster for me.   
Soon it was a grounding anchor for me. If I was overwhelmed, I could listen to Alex’s heartbeat, and I’d be okay. I had something to focus on.   
I hurt Alex my existing. I usurped her childhood and her teenage years and even her college life because what would have happened if I’d never fallen to earth?  
What if someone else had found me?  
And yet. I cling to her. Alex, my sister, the girl who helped me tame my powers, the girl who stood by me when I came out, the girl who didn’t hate me when I stole that from her too—  
I came out first. Supergirl, going public, open for scrutiny and observation and public comment.   
Alex, gay. No difference.   
I wear the red bull’s eye. Alex put her heart out there for Maggie, and Maggie stomped on it until she realized Alex wasn’t some love-blind fool.   
I shouldn’t hate Maggie. I shouldn’t resent her. She had experience and she thought Alex fit recognizable signs of—  
No. I resent Maggie. She wadded my sister up and threw her away and Alex looked her in the eye and told her how it was and Maggie's response was ‘meh?’ okay I’ll date you.   
It hurts, and I can never tell her. Alex or Maggie.   
I want to wake up.   
When I was sedated for the Black Mercy experiment, there was so much pain when I came back. I saw everything I’d done to people I loved with the whole of me and it was my fault because I was only one or two decisions from being that kind of monstrosity.   
The only thing that got me through it was; I woke up.   
Despite everything, it remained a bad dream. Probable, something that could happen, but a dream.   
This isn’t a dream. This is me, trapped under sedation that affects me only because of the poison in my chest.   
I can feel the bullets fragmenting. Kryptonite is not a stable substance and in order to mine it for bullets they had to wrap it in a shield that would mushroom on impact and stab the kryptonite shards into the flesh.   
My flesh.   
I want to wake up. I want to not hurt anymore.   
I have this coming.   
Why did they send us to earth?   
Why did they not save our home?  
Every alien I encounter, every piece of intergalactic super-technology I uncover and piece together with Winn and now Lena, I wonder; could this have saved Krypton?  
If it’d been applied, if the minds behind it had known, could it have—  
No.   
Much as I hurt, there are some thoughts I just don’t want to follow.   
I wonder if this is going to kill me. While the surgeons wait for my body to be pliable enough to extract the bullets, will they have fragmented too much to retrieve? Will it poison me, just kill me slowly?   
Will they keep me sedated the entire time?  
I don’t want to die.   
I don’t want to leave Lena alone.   
Oh Lena.   
Lena, a girl treated like a pawn and taught that love is something to manipulate, not feel. Lena, a girl so brilliant she had a cancer treatment start-up at 19, who gives TED talks every year.   
Lena, a superhero in every way that counts, and her uniform is pencil skirts and sleeveless blouses and she cares so much. She just cares, so much.   
Lena, who looks on the verge of tears every time I hug her a little tighter than normal.   
She thinks I don’t notice. And I act like I don’t. How do you have that conversation?  
Hey, Lena, I notice that you’re touch-starved and hurting and you matter to me almost as much as my sister and I’m scared of existing in a world where you don’t and—  
I was trying to help. I took two bullets because I tried to help.   
Would Lena have gotten hurt if I hadn’t tried?  
Probably.   
Then it was worth it.   
I want to wake up. Please. Please wake me up. I can’t surface out of this fugue and I’m scared, okay? I’m so scared.   
I’m thirteen and I’m trapped in a pod that’s malfunctioning and I can’t see out the window and all I know is nothing’s working right, and it’s hot inside here it’s so hot please I need to get out I’m suffocating in here please, I don’t want to die in this—  
A heartbeat.   
Two. Two heartbeats side-by-side. They were so close together I couldn’t tell them apart.   
One is a heartbeat I know in any coma. Even in the Black Mercy, I could hear Alex, in the distance recesses of my mind.   
And now. There’s a second heartbeat. One I’ve grown to know and listen for when I patrol every night. A strong heartbeat, steady and calm and steadfast.   
Lena. Lena’s with Alex and they’re both okay.   
Wake me up. I need to hug them.   
I don’t want to be down in this abyss anymore!  
The scalpels cut again and I flinch. I can’t stop myself, the pain reaches me where the sedatives do not because it’s not something I know how to cope with.   
It hurts, oh it hurts, please, stop, wake me up we’ll find another solution just stop hurting me please—

 

“Kara,” Alex’s voice is right there. Not through a window, not in another room, she’s near my ear and her voice is clear and gentle. “It’s okay. I’m here.”  
I feel her hand. It’s in mine and I can feel that.   
Lena. Lena’s heartbeat is closer. I hear her move towards me, her heart accelerates. Why? Is she scared? Don’t be scared, Lena, it’s okay, I just want to wake up, please—  
“Kara?” Lena’s voice is a wavering mess. She’s trying so hard to be strong. Oh Lena. “Um.”  
Her hand is in mine. I feel her fingers press against the pads of my palm and there is calm in my heart.   
The pain in me is distant and all I’m aware of is Lena’s touch. Her hand wraps slowly around mine.   
“So. You should live. Okay? Because I don’t have anyone else to roll eyes with when we’re stuck at a stuffy function and someone’s mansplaining quantum physics at me.”  
Even Alex laughs.   
Do you think Alex would support me if I tell her I love Lena?  
I need to tell Alex I support her and Maggie.   
People change. Okay? They can grow. And Maggie admitted she was wrong. And Alex isn’t dumb. She wouldn’t stay with someone if they treated her as expendable.   
Alex and Lena are next to me. Their heartbeats fill my ears and I’m okay. I’ll be okay.   
“Got it,” A surgeon says. “Turn on the sun-lamps. She can wake up soon.”  
Lena. Alex.   
I’m coming back for you.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed this! There's always more to come.


End file.
